I too was 15 when I discovered Clair Horner’s thinking. I found only his books as I was wandering around Venice in 1967 — but they were enough to lay eggs in my mind that eventually burrowed their way through my religious programming.

Making fun of religion worked wonders for me and helped break me free of my Mormon upbringing. I still have 4 of his books of aphorisms and little poems. And don’t forget the wonderful little cartoon-drawings, like the crucifix being pounded into someone’s head with a hammer by a grinning pontif.

He’s an antidote to the solemnity with which great crimes and monstrous evil are always performed. Everyone is supposed to keep a straight face during mysterious religious ceremonies, or in grave and patriotic preparations for war, with all the preposterous lies accepted in reverent silence. As long as nobody laughs, they get away with it. As long as nobody laughs….

Clair Horner was the one pointing and laughing, so I realized that maybe he had actually got the most appropriate response.

I used to read his books in 9th grade, sneaking them into the duller classes. Thank goodness I did!

They are PERFECT for an adolescent mind that needs a bit of help seeing how funny naked emperors are.

I can truly say he changed my life. I’m grateful.

It was the life of La Boheme sitting in the cafe after a day spent dodging landlords, scrounging just enough money to get by cleaning Positano’s coffee house in the hills above Malibu during the day.

I was just bouncing of of a 7 year failed marriage and living in Venice West felt a little like I had just found the place where I belonged.

I remember the Nature Boy, Eden Abnez frequenting the cafe on occasion. He lived exclusively n the royalties of his one pop song made famous by Nat King Cole.

But the there was Clare Horner. There was a standing tradition AKA the only rule in the house which was that anytime anyone rang the little tinker bell at the front of the cafe it meant they were going to read a poem and everybody in the joint better shut up — I think the threat was get thrown out — I don’t ever really remember that happening but I do remember that all we iconoclastic rebel misfits went mute everytime the bell would ring.

Clare Horner was an anomaly so far as other denizens who hung out at the cafe. He really carried the persona of the friendly vacuum cleaner salesman as he’d read his epigrams and poems in a john bodet styled midwester sing song “better-keep-the-light-on” voice. Most of the ‘weekend warriors’ who came to surf the scene on weekends or evenings were likely to be approached by Clare Horner with his mimeograph books under his arm. The irony was that somehow engaged by the only person who would smile and approach them — I think Clare would customarily wear slacks and perhaps a somewhat threadbare suit-styled coat — anyway they thought they had an in to a real live weird beatnik as they talked to Clare and the irony of it is that Clare didn’t think of himself nor was he regarded favorably as a beat poet. He was an odd one of a kind of guy, smiling a lot, exuding kindness and familiarity with everyone — especially the women. I remember he wasn’t very discriminating in that department either — I see him try to cozy up to any and all kinds of women from glamor puses to dogs. I think he has his own personal agenda that overrode every other consideration which was ‘to get laid every night’ — and he just might have.

Clare was one of those kinds of people, intelligent, down home, independent but absolutely consciously refused to grow up. It must have been a real kick to be his son. Sid, I wonder if any of your father’s charming eccentricities rubbed off on you.

The Beats that hung around Lawrence Lipton, Stuart Perkoff, the Gas House were not necessarily a homogenous group with a unified public stance. They were made up of a lot of determined individualists who in their determination to find out who they were found themselves rejecting the pie-in-the-sky, leave-it-to-beaver hypocrisy and conformity of the post war 1950′s.

No self respecting Beatnik except Lawrence Lipton (of “Holy Barbarians” fame) would ever call themselves a beatnik. That was mostly a name used by the media to identify the current phenomenon of artist rebels (I think these holy periods happen once or twice in a century if humanity is lucky).

Well this is about Clare Horner — they guy I used to occasionally cringe and prepare to leave the cafe when I’d see him entering. I think the reason is that I’m fundamentally an artistic snob. We were passing friends and I respected him and would have fought to the tooth to defend his right to be and to do what he was about doing. I always, always felt his sincere warm humanity and yes, gentleness. There was always an aha moment of humour when he land some satirical poem (I’d call it ‘noble drivel”) or epigram that would hit the mark. Most of it is lost however if it they are not delivered with his ‘john-bodet-sing-song voice’ “Hey Mr weight lifter, when are you use your muscles to do what you spend all your time preparing yourself to do?”

“Please Don’t Step On the Bacon” © Clair Horner 1963
“Please Don’t Step On the Eggs Either” © Clair Horner 1964
“Please Don’t Sit On the Left-Overs” © Clair Horner 1966
“Please Don’t Stumble Over the Brunch… on your way to lunch” © Clair Horner 1967

When I came to Venice, I had just spent most of the summer in San Francisco, reading my poems in coffee-houses on upper Grant Avenue on bills with poets like Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg and Dan Langton. I was way down the list and read mostly after the first-string had left but there were often still still pretty girls left in the audience so I was cool with it, All that is to say, I was not overly impressed with the literary scene in Venice. While I did appreciate the integrity and grittiness of Stewart Perkoff’s work, I never considered Clair Horner a poet. But, even at the time, I did consider him a world-class epigramarian, a Humanist, and an individual deep thinker. Twenty years later when William Dickey, approved my book of poems, for a Master’s Degree at San Francisco State, he used the latin phrase “sui generis” (constituting a class of its own, unique), I took that as a tremendous compliment. I would extend that compliment to Clair’s work For all the good and bad in it, is unique and after almost 50 years, I still find the good in it to be exceptional.

I am writing this post for two reasons:
1. If anyone has copies of other books by Clair Horner, I would appreciate either Xerox copies, quality scans or access to the originals so that I can scan them myself, which takes less than 2 hours…

2. I would like to contact Sid Horner, Clair’s son, to obtain permission to post the entire body of Clair’s work (unedited) on a web page dedicated to that purpose.

I believe that there is much in them that is worthy of being preserved.

“Man is like a dog, with a leash in his mouth, looking for a Master.”
<<< Clair Horner

Joey Tranchina
email me at; joey4rigs@earthlink.net &/or joeyfoto@free.fr

FYI: I live between Redwood City California & Séte, France. I have directed a needle exchange program in Silicon Valley, for 20 years, I am currently developing a medical support project in Mali, West Africa, and have just begun a series of translations of the poems of Giillaume Apollinaire.